There’s a reason all the traffic lights on Long Beach Island turn red simultaneously, and Long Beach Township Mayor Joseph Mancini says it’s a sobering one.

With the 580,000 summer residents of this resort destination expected to swell to 1.2 million this Fourth of July weekend, local officials say they’re trying to get ahead of any potential catastrophes that could occur when that many pedestrians and vehicles converge on an 18-mile strip of land.

Long Beach Island has seen 13 pedestrian/vehicle crashes between 2009 and 2012. This summer, with the help of federal funding and state expertise, drivers and pedestrians on Long Beach Island will learn how to stay safe on the roads together.

“We’re here bringing StreetSmart to the Jersey Shore — where walking is really such an important part of daily life,” said David Behrend, a spokesman for the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority.

Part of the StreetSmartNJ campaign involves urging motorists to adhere to speed limits. In a demonstration yesterday in Long Beach Township, police officials showed the difference a few miles per hour makes in being able to stop for a pedestrian.

For the demonstration, a “dummy” dressed as a little boy was placed 20 feet beyond orange cones designating where the crash test driver had to put on the brakes at varying speeds. Traveling at 25 mph, the car took 15-16 feet to stop, missing the dummy by nearly 4 feet. At 35 mph, the car hit the dummy and threw it 15 feet. At 42 mph, the dummy was knocked out of its black sneakers and thrown 50 feet. One of its arms broke off.

Long Beach Township police Lt. Paul Vereb has been there. His brother, Vernon Christiansen, was hit by a car on Route 1 in Edison in 1987 and lived in a come for seven years before dying at age 50. Vereb said those seven years strained his family life but also inspired him to be proactive about pedestrian safety.
“I’m looking forward to many years of not having to deal with any families as I’ve had to deal with my own family,” Vereb said.

Police in Long Beach Township demonstrate how speed affects a motorist's ability to stop when a pedestrian steps into the street.MaryAnn Spoto/The Star-Ledger

Long Beach Island’s main thoroughfare, Long Beach Boulevard, has five lanes of traffic, a virtual nightmare for pedestrians trying to get to or from the beach. Thankfully, Vereb said, there haven’t been many fatalities — the most recent one was about three years ago — but he said he’s starting to see the number of serious injuries creep up.

In the past decade, officials on the island decreased the speed limit on the boulevard from 40 mph to 35 mph, added police patrols and speed signs in known trouble areas and timed all the traffic lights to turn red at the same time to give pedestrians enough time to cross streets safely.

Now with this StreetSmart initiative, which launched in November in Jersey City, Newark, Hackettstown and Woodbridge, towns on Long Beach Island are expanding on that decade of traffic tweaks, Mancini said.

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They’re getting money from the Federal Highway Administration and the New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety to put more patrols in trouble spots and improve engineering at crosswalks. And they’re getting pamphlets and other informational material to distribute from the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority.

Pedestrians take unnecessary chances when they cross the road at places other than crosswalks and police want to change that, Vereb said.